The Galveston Diet: The Doctor-Developed, Patient-Proven Plan to Burn Fat and Tame Your Hormonal Symptoms - book cover
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  • Publisher : Rodale Books
  • Published : 10 Jan 2023
  • Pages : 288
  • ISBN-10 : 0593578899
  • ISBN-13 : 9780593578896
  • Language : English

The Galveston Diet: The Doctor-Developed, Patient-Proven Plan to Burn Fat and Tame Your Hormonal Symptoms

WALL STREET JOURNAL AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER • A patient-proven eating and lifestyle program to balance nutrition and sustain weight loss-including more than 40 delicious recipes and 6 weeks of meal plans-tailored to women in midlife.

"I haven't changed my diet or exercise habits and yet the scale keeps moving in the wrong direction. What's going on?!"

Time and again, this is the question Dr. Mary Claire Haver's patients asked. At first, a practicing OB/GYN, she'd dutifully advise what she'd been taught in medical school: eat less and work out more. But that standard advice didn't solve the problem because back then she-and so many other doctors-hadn't taken into account the physiological factors affecting women. They tend to store fat, they can have a hard time accessing that stored fat as active fuel, and their hormonal fluctuations in midlife exacerbate the situation.

Then, Dr. Haver found herself in this exact predicament with the added issues of low energy, hot flashes, and brain fog. So she set out to develop a nutrition program that would meet her own and her patients' needs once and for all. Now, nearly 100,000 women have found success in Dr. Haver's unique plan for permanent weight loss and reduced menopausal symptoms by following her three interconnected strategies:

• Fuel Refocus: Starting in their thirties, women need a specific ratio of healthy fats, lean protein, and quality carbohydrates to efficiently burn fat as fuel.
• Intermittent Fasting: 16 hours of fasting with a flexible 8-hour eating window coaxes the body to draw energy from stored fat and decreases inflammation.
• Anti-inflammatory Nutrition: Limit added sugars, processed carbs, chemical additives and preservatives and layer in anti-inflammatory foods like leafy greens, olive oil, berries, nuts, and tomatoes.

With these three principles working together, women can finally lose stubborn weight as well as enjoy newfound energy, better sleep, less brain fog, and fewer hot flashes. Featuring forty delicious recipes, six weeks of easy-to-follow meal plans, shopping lists, and success stories of women who have changed their lives on this plan, The Galveston Diet-named for Dr. Haver's hometown-will revolutionize the conversation around weight loss for women, with health benefits that last a lifetime.

Editorial Reviews

"Dr. Haver is an excellent motivational speaker and educator, and her passion for helping women find nutritional and lifestyle solutions to counter the negative effects of menopause is inspiring. The validation of common hormonal symptoms and commiseration with weight gain challenges, especially from a physician with similar struggles, is likely a rare and comforting experience for many women."-Forbes Health

Readers Top Reviews

LarryBevLinda
The book is put together pretty well, the copy I purchased was cheaply put together as the binding doesn’t hold the papers well. As for the diet: While she does educate us on hormones that activate and deactivate, I don’t see a whole lot of unique solutions. In a nut shell. *Don’t worry about calories (it is as imperfect a science as carbon dating the Earth). *Stay away from sugar apart from natural sugars. *Eat more FIBER and eat it before you eat carbs and sugars since fiber helps process the sugars out of your system. *Eat less carbs but do not skip complex carbs *Exercise and fast
DrafterGirlLarryB
I’m almost through all of the book, and making lists just like Santa. This is a change I didn’t know I Needed, but I knew I needed to change ‘something’. Smacked into menopause after full hysterectomy at 46, I feel torn-apart being tossed back into life with all these issues my family doctor keeps ignoring and blowing off. I’m changing my lifestyle now to see if I can get rid of any of this “Darkness” that menopause has placed on me. What I’ve read so far is how your menopausal body is in need of Very different things then what it allowed before -New information - I’ve not been given by other medical professionals, even after begging for anything to help. This is a health change I can do, and I’m beyond ready for it, and so is my body. This book breaks it down nicely and so far understandably. I’m so excited to have found it and Dr. Haver
Kristin ADrafterG
I have been following Dr Mary on IG . I am really looking forward to improving my health. And hopefully, I will lose fat too. I have just finished this book and I am now putting it into action! The Galveston Diet book is easy to read, to understand, and full of helpful information on macronutrients. More importantly, Dr Mary Claire Haver addresses many of the challenges menopausal women face. She explains the reasons behind those challenges and offers solutions. The plan is well explained with pages of meal helps and recipes. I will update this review as I see progress.
JenniferKristin A
I started The Galveston Diet Online Program a year ago, and I've lost 5% body fat in the past year without suffering from starvation. I plowed through this book last night and cannot wait to try the new recipes! Taking an anti-inflammatory approach to my nutrition has been life-changing. I eat real food and understand why this is so important to my health. Intermittent fasting has been essential for my well-being and handling demands from work and life and has simplified my day. I'm not perfect; I don't stick to everything 100%, but the tools and revisiting them have led to great success. This book will open your eyes to what is happening in your body as you age. Dr. Haver breaks down the science in a way that makes sense to me. I cannot read a medical journal, nor do I want to... Thank you, Dr. Haver! You have changed my life and simplified my daily choices for me. It has led to great results, and I look forward to continuing to see positive results.
NHartJenniferKris
I have been following Dr. Haver on social media for some time. Last year after many trials and errors doing keto, paleo, calorie counting, I couldn’t understand why I could no longer lose weight/fat they way I used to when I was younger. My doctor kept naysaying and “mansplaining” so much that I finally went to see a female ob. Same thing, more nonsense, less validation. And then I started to pay attention to Dr. Haver’s messages, went on her website- got the program and changed everything! I lost 23 lbs in less than 3 months and have kept it off while at the same time building lean muscle and rebuilding my body. I found the program so easy to follow and the way Dr. Haver explains it in plain non-Dr English makes so much sense. Every single page, every anecdote I was like “omg, me too!!” This book and all the research Dr. Haver has done is a real gift to women worldwide. I feel so much comfort knowing that future generations won’t have to suffer with peri-and menopause in silence. It is truly disappointing the way that the majority of physicians are so clueless when it comes to this highly troublesome time in a woman’s life. The fact that reproductive health gets so much attention and menopause gets so little is unsettling. Think about it: Some women will go on to have children but ALL women will experience menopause. This should be mandatory REQUIRED reading for ALL medical students. Thank you Dr. Haver!!

Short Excerpt Teaser

Introduction

From our first day of life until the last, our bodies are always changing. This is a part of aging-a natural process no one can escape. But the changes that happen to women in midlife are unique and are often unsettling. Suddenly we're having odd symptoms like hot flashes and an accumulation of strange, new weight gain around our midsections. Our skin can be very dry or wrinkling more. We may have joint pain, hair loss, headaches, bloating, and worsening anxiety or depression. Sleep becomes elusive. Sexual intercourse can hurt. Little things set us off.

A lot of this may be happening to you right now. Trust me, you are not alone. Let me introduce you to someone who knows exactly what you're going through: me.

I was a busy physician, a mom, and a wife in my late forties. My main health challenge at the time was polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a condition caused by insulin resistance, in which insulin can't do its job of ushering glucose into cells for energy. PCOS leads to erratic periods, acne, infertility, ovarian cysts, and unwanted hair growth.

About 1 in 10 women of childbearing age has PCOS. The majority (about 70 percent) are overweight or even obese, but I was among the 30 percent of normal weight. Fortunately, PCOS is treatable, and in my case, taking hormones greatly helped.

Then came a death in my family; I lost my brother, Bob, to liver failure. I was despondent. He was my daughters' favorite uncle, a creative fun spirit with whom I had a special bond. We were dance partners when I was younger, winning dance competitions all over Louisiana. When he died, I was heartbroken, and losing him brought crushing pain.

Grief does strange things to each of us. For me, I coped by bingeing. Night after night after long clinic shifts, I stood in front of my pantry, gobbling handfuls of Goldfish crackers. I'd wash them down with glasses of wine. Pretty quickly I gained nearly 20 pounds. I looked like a different person, and I felt miserable.

With my medical background, I knew that at my age it might be time to come off the hormones for a while. So, I talked to my own doctor, and we agreed that I should.

But taking the hormones had masked the perimenopausal symptoms that occur during midlife, so within two weeks of being off them, everything abruptly changed-and not for the better. I had hot flashes and I felt like I was burning from the inside out. Along came sleepless nights and, most troubling of all, the fuzzy and forgetful feeling called brain fog. My long, thick hair started falling out by the brushful. My skin felt parched from head to toe, and I had to completely change my skincare routine to keep my skin moisturized. My body ached so much that I kidded with a friend that I'd give up my firstborn to get relief. My sleep became a recurring nightmare of multiple awakenings through the night-at first drenched in sweat, and then freezing once the hot flash passed.

I knew I was going through a period of hormonal change-perimenopause-but the symptoms it produced were so profoundly intense that I was really alarmed. All this on top of the weight gain? I was a mess.

Then I heard my brother Bob's voice in my head. "Girl, you don't have to wallow in this anymore. You got yourself into this; you can get yourself out."

I went to work on my weight first. I did exactly what I and other doctors had always counseled patients to do: eat less, exercise more.

My efforts paid off, sort of. I'd lose a pound or two, but that was it. Then the weight would come right back on. I was starving myself and working out obsessively, but hardly dropping any weight. It was very frustrating. I just wanted to fix me, but nothing I did or tried was sticking.

I realized that I was struggling with the same weight issues many of my patients had told me about. They would sit in the examining room, often clutching paper gowns, and ask for advice about losing weight, frustrated with the fact that they had changed their diet and exercise habits and yet the scale kept moving in the wrong direction. I'd spend the next several minutes speaking with them about the combined power of diet and exercise. But for the majority of these women at this age, what I had been taught, and what had worked for me in the past, stopped working. They had fought for years to shed stubborn weight, without much permanent success. I'm sorry that it took having this same thing happen to me to change my tune, but that's the truth. When my own good advice didn't help me, it really hit me that I was doing something wrong.

I then threw myself into researching weight management and human metabolism-specifically as t...